


Temari

by OxfordOctopus



Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [10]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Azn Bad Boys - Freeform, F/F, Foil's Cluster, Gangs, Half-Japanese Taylor Hebert, Supervillains, Taylor has Homer's Powers, Ward Spoilers, Worm 2 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-23 05:29:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20003071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: (Spoilers for Worm 2/Ward)Taylor, one of Lung's capes, meets an old friend in a weird place.





	Temari

“You’ve _got_ to be fucking with me.” The words were entirely involuntary, that sort of knee-jerk reaction that’d only gotten worse over the past couple of years. “Seriously?”

The victim of Lung’s inability to recruit people through anything but force jerked her gaze up, wild and not necessarily fearful, but _kinda_ getting there. There was a pregnant pause as something close to recognition settled over her features, her eyes flicking away to roam her face.

“... _Taylor_?” The voice was tantalizingly hopeful. Shame, that. “The fuck, _Taylor?_ ”

Taylor winced at the accusatory tone, shuffling the bat she kept on hand a bit further into the dip of her nape. “I go by Temari, when I’m wearing the mask, but uhm. Yeah.”

“The actual _fuck_? Why are you working for a fucking dragon? Why aren’t you still in New York, the fuck happened to you?” Ha-ha, wow, Mia was really pissed. Didn’t Lung say she was a Tinker? Something about bombs? Surely it couldn’t be _that_ simple. “Wait, you have powers? Double wait, _Temari_? The fuck kind of stupid name is _that_?”

Okay, Mia, _tone it the fuck back_. “I didn’t want to argue with the, to quote, ‘fucking dragon’ about a name choice.” She wasn’t _totally_ lying, but it was coming close. “That and I’d really do anything to get away from March, like _fuckin’ yikes_.”

“Did you just say _yikes_?” Jesus, how was that girl fitting that much accusation into such an innocuous statement? “I know you’re half, Tay— _Temari_ , but c’mon, that’s a bit white even for you.”

“You’re as white as I am.”

“You and I both know you’re like the color of gouache you little shit.”

Taylor grunted, kicking out with one foot. The cage they’d put the Tinker in rattled noisily from the impact.

Mia snarled. “Do not _test_ me, I can and will dismantle that goddamn lock, fashion a _goddamn_ explosive out of it, _and feed it to you_.” She might have even sounded scary if she wasn’t currently locked eight ways to sunday.

“I'll make the grunts bring down another set of Brute manacles, _Bak-u-da_.” Mmh, there was nothing quite so satisfying as being as _bitter_ as humanly fucking possible. “So we’re at an impasse, clearly.”

‘Bakuda’ shuffled in her restraints, baring her teeth in what should be a display of defiance but mostly ended up making her look _kinda_ constipated.

There was another quiet pause. “Wait, _March?_ You mean May?”

“The fuck did you figure that out?”

“Your inflection.”

Taylor's lips tightened as she glanced away. Yeah, she’d have to work on that later. “She got obsessed with Lily _while we were still dating_.”

Bakuda’s laughter was more of a cackle than much else. “Oh my fucking god, did she _seriously_ go for both of you?”

“I uh, think she got worse after she went missing for a few months?” She slid her eyes away from the Tinker, nodding her head at one of the henchmen who quickly retreated back up the concrete stairs. “Came back to New York, had a sorta-girlfriend-but-not? She started acting weird, too, like uh. She was kinda _normal_ with me, but she’d started making ‘I wanna wear your fuckin’ skin’ eyes at Lily.”

Bakuda’s face puckered up into something close to a sour expression. “That’s kinda gross,” she admitted after a pause. “Then again, Lily’s skin _did_ loo—”

“I swear to _fuck_ Mia.”

The Tinker devolved into another bout of cackles. Bitch even _sounded_ evil, no wonder she caught Lung’s attention.

One of the grunts came back down the stairs with a duffel bag, handing it over at a healthy but unreasonable distance. “ _Get lost_.” Wanna know something funny? Lung made all of his capes learn the ‘major three languages’: Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. Sure was studious for a lizard, not that she’d enjoyed the last year of having it crammed down her throat. “ _Tell Lung she’ll be up in, eh, ten minutes?_ ”

“ _He said five_.” The grunt made a good _damn_ point.

“Hey, Bakuda?” Taylor unzipped the duffel bag, dropping her bat off to the side to start pulling out the Tinker’s costume to-be.

Somehow, she could tell that the other girl was starting to realize what was about to happen. “Uhuh?”

“How partial are you to getting manhandled by me?” She chucked a mask in through the bars, reaching forward to quickly pull away at the locks on the cage.

Bakuda froze, choking on whatever she was about to say. “I thought you were into muscles?”

The door came free with a creaky whine. Taylor felt a smile toying at her lips, Bakuda visibly shrinking back into the corner. “I usually am, y’know?” she pulled at the top and bottom and the – the, was that _seriously_ a belt covered in fake, no, wait, _very fucking real_ grenades? Jesus christ. “But uh. Lung’s kinda—” she made a gun with her fingers and, with little preamble, mimed getting her head fucking blown out, “—if you get what I mean.”

“You allowed to unlock my manacles and shit?” Bakuda was quick to shove her arms out regardless. Typical.

Reaching forward, she unlatched the first few, turned off the bomb-collar-esque detonator with a code that was literally ‘1-2-3-4’ - she’d have to get on Hori’s shit tonight, clearly - and pulled it off with a quiet grunt. “Not really, actually. But I’d rather you be unshackled than be late, dude’s _suuuuper_ anal about people being on time.”

“Ugh. This is going to suck, isn’t it?” Bakuda’s voice was only muffled slightly as her shirt was pulled up and over her head in record time, revealing an unimaginative wifebeater tee underneath it. “I kinda expected some of this, when he came forward with his uh, ‘recruitment pitch’, but not _this_ bad.”

Shoving the heavy black top down over a protesting Bakuda’s head, she helped to fasten it quickly into place and get all the belts in place. She also pulled at the pants, which Bakuda helped her get off by lifting her lack of ass, the jeans - looking _weirdly_ high class - coming off with her socks and shoes, the entire bundle discarded at the side. She jammed the leggings into Bakuda’s arms, shot her a look, and started to pull out the accessories, tossing shit behind her as she went.

“Goddammit, I was _not_ ready for this type of bullshit.” Bakuda’s tone closely resembled a scowl, somehow. The other girl had been good at being emotive, but maybe this was just her power weighing on shit? Who the fuck knows. “At least they got my sizes right, but that raises the next fuckin’ question: _why do they know my sizes_.”

“Less talking more dressing,” was all she managed out in response, sifting through the remainder of the accessories and extra bullshit they’d piled away in it. The shuffling behind her did sound promising though, so she kept up with her pace, even when she took hold of what looked to be a spool of... cord? The fuck? Whatever, back it went.

Apparently, though, Bakuda was about as startled as she was. The cord hit her with a _really_ satisfying _thwump_. “Did you just throw some fucking electrical wire at me? An entire _spool_ of it?” Her voice had started to edge into hysterics. That probably wasn’t good. “The fuck am I even supposed to do with this?”

“I don’t know! Fucking do something with it?”

“What could I even _do_?”

“ _LOOP IT UNDER YOUR SHOULDER OR SOMETHING_ , I don’t know! If Lung gives you something to wear, _you wear it_!”

“FINE. FUCK!”

Taylor huffed, reaching out to grab the misplaced mask as she turned. Bakuda was more or less fully outfitted, looking somewhere between a padded electrician and a ganger. It looked – well, it looked good enough, that mix between utilitarian and Japanese blue collar worker was something she’d seen on Oni Lee. She also noticed, with no small amount of mirth, that it completely flattened Bakuda’s tits out.

Ha! Eat shit.

She shoved the mask over Bakuda’s hair and held her right shoulder as she locked the dumb gas mask into place. The look she got for her troubles pretty much made up for the _entire_ bullshit fiasco to begin with. She reached down, grabbed the girl’s other shoulder, and pulled the humanoid chihuahua to her feet.

“So,” Bakuda’s voice was, unsurprisingly, kinda distorted by the weird air filters. It helped cut out the shrill harpy quality it normally had. “How’d you even end up like this?”

Making sure Bakuda was following her, Taylor mulled over the question as they started to ascend the concrete stairs. “So, y’know my mom? A heinous bitch and washed up academic? Yeah, she uh, kinda kicked Abbigayle out of the house after she started dating some guy. She claimed it was ‘cos he did drugs, but I mean, shit, _I_ did drugs, so I think it was because he was black?”

Bakuda grunted.

“So, anyway, she eventually dumps him to get back in mom’s good graces. Abby’s _suuuuper_ fucked up from roughing it, though, and Lily was kinda doing better for herself? So I end up being Abby’s shitty chaperone.” The first sub basement was filled with, shocker, tons of drugs. She waved the both of them forward into the next stairwell, this one looking a bit more metal and a little less dungeon-y. “She’s kinda gone off the rails, and so we see Lily hanging out with her friends from the orphanage or wherever the fuck mom kept dumping her after she became ‘too much’, and lo and behold Abby fuckin jumps her. They both fall off and onto the tracks of the subway station we were at. People are screaming, others fall in, others are dragged up.”

The last of the stairway started to give. The smell of roast pork was more and more difficult to ignore as they started to near the main floor.

“Train hits Abby, not Lily. Lily triggers, _I_ trigger, fuckin’ _May_ triggers. Lily’s still unaware it’s a cluster thing, but May kinda figured it out real quick.” A pair of recruits bowed stiffly towards them as they neared the doors. Out of the corner of her eye, Taylor was _pretty sure_ that she saw Bakuda grinning like a loon at the sign of respect. “I end up with a handful of powers. I can make shit ricochet, turns them into deadly projectiles with each bounce, I got accuracy that more or less is keyed to ‘kill upon impact’, but I’ve managed to tone that down to ‘not kill’ with practice, and I got this sorta timing awareness that’s tied to things in motion? I don’t know, it’s hard to explain.”

She shook her head, dismissing the conjecture. _Focus_. “A few years after that and mom can’t pay dad anymore, so I get shipped off to the ‘Bay. I’ve hid my powers pretty well, but I was known enough in New York that it didn’t take a genius to put two and two together. Lung finds me, gives me an offer I _simply_ can’t refuse, and it’s been that way for like? The last year or so.” The door opened with a satisfying _click_ , opening up into Lung’s weirdly regal throne-chamber-thing. Mahogany walls, a red carpet, a frankly disturbingly overused Lay-Z Boy, within which the big dick lizard sat. On either end of the red carpet the normal leaders stood, looking stiff and all sorts of unhappy, and around them sat some literal piles of gold, piles of drugs, one conspicuous _pile of literal women_ , and a few piles of old Japanese antiques that the boss had a bad habit of collecting.

“Right, bow when you get up to him, say ‘yes’ to whatever he asks, don’t talk back, and pretend this is all normal and totally what it was like in Japan, okay?” Taylor was real glad that she figured out Lung’s squishy human hearing range early on, otherwise she might’ve said something stupid by now. “Just, yeah. I won’t be there to guide you along, so uh, good luck?”

Beneath the mask, Bakuda looked more than a little horrified, but followed her through the doors regardless. The recruits shut it behind them, the sound barely a _click_.

“This is gonna be the death of me.”

“Stop grousing, Bakuda. C’mon.”


End file.
